No Arabic abstract
Cosmic voids are a promising environment to characterize neutrino-induced effects on the large-scale distribution of matter in the universe. We perform a comprehensive numerical study of the statistical properties of voids, identified both in the matter and galaxy distributions, in massive and massless neutrino cosmologies. The matter density field is obtained by running several independent $N$-body simulations with cold dark matter and neutrino particles, while the galaxy catalogs are modeled by populating the dark matter halos in simulations via a halo occupation distribution (HOD) model to reproduce the clustering properties observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) II Data Release 7. We focus on the impact of massive neutrinos on the following void statistical properties: number density, ellipticities, two-point statistics, density and velocity profiles. Considering the matter density field, we find that voids in massive neutrino cosmologies are less evolved than those in the corresponding massless neutrinos case: there is a larger number of small voids and a smaller number of large ones, their profiles are less evacuated, and they present a lower wall at the edge. Moreover, the degeneracy between $sigma_8$ and $Omega_{ u}$ is broken when looking at void properties. In terms of the galaxy density field, we find that differences among cosmologies are difficult to detect because of the small number of galaxy voids in the simulations. Differences are instead present when looking at the matter density and velocity profiles around these voids.
Halos and galaxies are tracers of the underlying dark matter structures. While their bias is well understood in the case of a simple Universe composed dominantly of dark matter, the relation becomes more complex in the presence of massive neutrinos. Indeed massive neutrinos introduce rich dynamics in the process of structure formation leading to scale-dependent bias. We study this process from the perspective of general relativity employing a simple spherical collapse model. We find a characteristic signature at the neutrino free-streaming scale in addition to a large-scale feature from general relativity. The scale-dependent halo bias opposes the suppression in the matter distribution due to neutrino free-streaming and leads to corrections of a few percent in the halo power spectrum. It is not only sensitive to the sum of the neutrino-masses, but respond to the individual masses. Accurate models for the neutrino bias are a crucial ingredient for the future data analysis and play an important role in constraining the neutrino masses.
The set-up of the initial conditions in cosmological N-body simulations is usually implemented by rescaling the desired low-redshift linear power spectrum to the required starting redshift consistently with the Newtonian evolution of the simulation. The implementation of this practical solution requires more care in the context of massive neutrino cosmologies, mainly because of the non-trivial scale-dependence of the linear growth that characterises these models. In this work we consider a simple two-fluid, Newtonian approximation for cold dark matter and massive neutrinos perturbations that can reproduce the cold matter linear evolution predicted by Boltzmann codes such as CAMB or CLASS with a 0.1% accuracy or below for all redshift relevant to nonlinear structure formation. We use this description, in the first place, to quantify the systematic errors induced by several approximations often assumed in numerical simulations, including the typical set-up of the initial conditions for massive neutrino cosmologies adopted in previous works. We then take advantage of the flexibility of this approach to rescale the late-time linear power spectra to the simulation initial redshift, in order to be as consistent as possible with the dynamics of the N-body code and the approximations it assumes. We implement our method in a public code providing the initial displacements and velocities for cold dark matter and neutrino particles that will allow accurate, i.e. one-percent level, numerical simulations for this cosmological scenario.
We estimate the velocity field in a large set of $N$-body simulations including massive neutrino particles, and measure the auto-power spectrum of the velocity divergence field as well as the cross-power spectrum between the cold dark matter density and the velocity divergence. We perform these measurements at four different redshifts and within four different cosmological scenarios, covering a wide range in neutrino masses. We find that the nonlinear correction to the velocity power spectra largely depend on the degree of nonlinear evolution with no specific dependence on the value of neutrino mass. We provide a fitting formula, based on the value of the r.m.s. of the matter fluctuations in spheres of $8h^{-1}$Mpc, describing the nonlinear corrections with 3% accuracy on scales below $k=0.7; h$ Mpc$^{-1}$.
Do void statistics contain information beyond the tracer 2-point correlation function? Yes! As we vary the sum of the neutrino masses, we find void statistics contain information absent when using just tracer 2-point statistics. Massive neutrinos uniquely affect cosmic voids. We explore their impact on void clustering using both the DEMNUni and MassiveNuS simulations. For voids, neutrino effects depend on the observed void tracers. As the neutrino mass increases, the number of small voids traced by cold dark matter particles increases and the number of large voids decreases. Surprisingly, when massive, highly biased, halos are used as tracers, we find the opposite effect. The scale at which voids cluster, as well as the void correlation, is similarly sensitive to the sum of neutrino masses and the tracers. This scale dependent trend is not due to simulation volume or halo density. The interplay of these signatures in the void abundance and clustering leaves a distinct fingerprint that could be detected with observations and potentially help break degeneracies between different cosmological parameters. This paper paves the way to exploit cosmic voids in future surveys to constrain the mass of neutrinos.
Cosmic voids are progressively emerging as a new viable cosmological probe. Their abundance and density profiles are sensitive to modifications of gravity, as well as to dark energy and neutrinos. The main goal of this work is to investigate the possibility of exploiting cosmic void statistics to disentangle the degeneracies resulting from a proper combination of $f(R)$ modified gravity and neutrino mass. We use N-body simulations to analyse the density profiles and size function of voids traced by both dark matter particles and haloes. We find clear evidence of the enhancement of gravity in $f(R)$ cosmologies in the void density profiles at $z=1$. However, these effects can be almost completely overridden by the presence of massive neutrinos because of their thermal free-streaming. Despite the limited volume of the analysed simulations does not allow us to achieve a statistically relevant abundance of voids larger than $40 mathrm{Mpc}/h$, we find that the void size function at high redshifts and for large voids is potentially an effective probe to disentangle these degenerate cosmological models, which is key in the prospective of the upcoming wide field redshift surveys.